Category: visual

“An unnamed American collector paid $70 million [£42 million] for Portrait of George Dyer Talking, a 1966 canvas depicting the artist’s lover perched on a stool, his twisted body positioned under a naked light bulb as though he were being interrogated.”

Christopher Knight looks at how the men and women who rescued so much great European art from the Nazis affected U.S. museums – much for the better – after they came home.

“Art collectors are paying thousands of dollars for exuberantly garish movie posters that Ghanaian artists painted on flour sacks in the 1980s and 1990s, inspiring artists to start creating more of them.”

The painting’s authenticity was first suspected by the art historian Douglas Cooper in the 1970s and the work, supposedly from Léger’s “Contraste de formes” series of 1913-14, was never exhibited or catalogued as a result.

“The real reason galleries need to exist isn’t to help their owners’ bottom lines or to coax work out of artists; it’s not about those artists’ profile and pride; it’s not even about collectors and clients. It’s about the general public—or at least a dedicated public of art lovers—who in the long run, maybe the very long run, will be the most powerful players in the art game.”

“Germany will set up an independent center to comb museum collections for art looted by the Nazis, the country’s culture minister said, shortly before representatives for the son of an art dealer tied to Hitler disclosed another hidden cache of paintings.”

“‘We will take the façade down, piece by piece, and we will store it,’ Glenn D. Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, said in an interview last week. ‘We have made no decision about what happens subsequently, other than the fact that we’ll have it and it will be preserved.'”

“In a context hugely dominated by specialization, the generalist gets very strange opportunities. There are very few people left to connect the dots. Being a laymen with curiosity, which both of them often are, becomes a virtue.”

It seems unnecessary in hindsight, but in 1942 and ’43, after Pearl Harbor and the bombing of Britain, air attacks on the U.S. mainland seemed like a real danger. Here are the (considerable) steps some art institutions took to protect their holdings.

To be more specific, they’ll be made of fungus and corn stalks. They’ll be at MoMA’s P.S. 1 outpost this summer.